WASHINGTON - A former top State Department
official has singled out diplomatic engagement as
the best available option for ending decades of
"mistrust and misunderstanding" between Washington
and Tehran.

"Take the sanctions pressure
and turn it into a useful diplomatic tool to begin
serious diplomatic negotiations with Iran," Thomas
Pickering said at a Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations hearing in the Capitol on Wednesday.

"Such a new direction will require much
care and management of the rhetoric to cause the
diplomatic process [to] move forward," said
Pickering, a former US under secretary of state
for political affairs as well as ambassador to the
United Nations, Russia, India, Israel and Jordan.

Pickering presented his remarks to the
influential senate

committee on the same day
that Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi
reportedly announced that talks between Iran and
the "Iran Six" (P5+1 - the United States, Britain,
France, Russia, China and Germany) would resume on
April 13.

In February, Iran indicated it
was ready to resume negotiations after a hiatus of
more than a year. The US and European Union (EU)
responded with cautious optimism, but experts
warned that few substantial results should be
expected from just one meeting, especially given
recently heightened tensions.

Carl Bildt,
Sweden's foreign minister and a serious advocate
for diplomacy with Iran, called the resumption of
talks a welcome development. Still, he told Agence
France-Presse last week, "Don't expect there will
be a quick resolution of issues, because the gulf
of mistrust is so enormously deep."

At a
Capitol Hill briefing on February 22, Hans Blix,
former chief of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), stated that revived talks should
focus first on defusing tensions over Tehran's
nuclear program to avert possible Israeli military
strikes.

"We don't expect too much now,
but we need to defuse the most acute things and
prepare the road for further talks," he said.

Although he emphasized that the threat of
force should be kept on the table, striking Iran
militarily would do little to impede any alleged
Iranian nuclear ambitions, said General James E
Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, at the Wednesday hearing,
reflecting a general consensus among high-level
military officials.

"My worry is that it's
not going to do much to change their mind," he
said.

Others who testified before the
senate committee were extremely pessimistic about
the possibility of successful diplomacy with Iran,
or at least while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
holds power.

Karim Sadjadpour, a policy
analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, wrote, "Tehran can be made
without Khamenei, but it appears almost equally
unlikely that any deal can be made with him. There
are currently no indications, however, to believe
that international pressure will compel Khamenei
to make the types of meaningful and binding
compromises on its nuclear program."

"The
goal of coercive diplomacy should be to
significantly slow Iran's nuclear progress, and
contain their regional political influence, until
the regime is eventually forced to change - or is
changed - under the weight of its own internal
contradictions and economic malaise," said
Sadjadpour.

But according to Pickering,
the idea that pursuing regime change in Iran can
bring about positive results is "far fetched and
highly unlikely", because US history with
"changing regimes has been pretty parlous".

Since the Iranian perception that the
United States has a policy of regime change
appears to hinder progress in dealing with Iran's
nuclear program, "the US will need to consider how
and when that policy, or the Iranian perception of
it, should come off the table," he added.

Beyond sanctionsA House
proposal to impose measures more extreme than mere
"crippling" economic sanctions, such as making it
illegal for any US official to even speak to an
Iranian official, as well as a non-binding
resolution that rules out containing Iran,
suggests that lawmakers are working to limit the
president's options with Iran.

This trend
has compelled former defense officials to speak
out against the possible dire consequences of the
draconian proposals.

Richard L Klass, a
retired Air Force colonel, wrote this week that
the anti-containment resolution led by a
bipartisan group of senators - Bob Casey, Lindsey
Graham and Joseph Lieberman - "confuses the issue"
and "could be taken to authorize the use of force
if Iran gets a nuclear weapon".

"The
resolution blocks a containment strategy and
endorses US military action regardless of any
other circumstances," wrote the former defense
official.

Still, some lawmakers have made
some limited attempts to ease tensions.

This month, Representative Barbara Lee
proposed lifting the ban on US-Iranian contact and
appointing a US representative for Iran devoted to
pursuing all diplomatic avenues to stave off
Iranian nuclear weapon acquisition and war.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has blocked
a bill that required unanimous consent and was
designed to speed up the imposition of further
sanctions on Iran. He objected after his own
amendment, meant to ensure that nothing in the
bill could be construed as authorization for force
against Iran or Syria, was refused, Reuters
reported.

While congress appears
overwhelmingly in favor of further punitive
measures against Iran as long as the country
continues to make nuclear advances that the United
States and Israel consider suspicious and
unnecessary, some still view the resumption of
talks in April as a window for positive
possibilities.

Pickering ended his remarks
today by quoting an Iranian "friend" involved in
Tehran's foreign policy. "The historical record
shows that every time we have been ready, you have
not been, and every time you have been ready, we
have not been."

"Maybe," Pickering
suggested, "we can emerge from that position of
the past to begin with some small things - that we
can find the way to pull the curves mutual of
interest together rather than have them continue
to bend apart."